Henri Joins the Circus

Henri catching the wing of a windmill.

To give us a break in the midst of our pandemic and political drama, as well as for my friends and family coping with fire and smoke on the West Coast of the U.S., I offer this to bring a smile to your face.

Attending an international Nouwen conference in Toronto in the summer of 2016, I was reminded of the research Henri Nouwen did for a book he never wrote about the Flying Rodleighs, trapeze artists in a German circus. He wanted it to say something about the spiritual life in more universal (rather than religious) language. So I wrote and posted this children’s story on August 10, 2016. I had fun drawing Henri on a windmill!  It alludes to his early book Clowning in Rome and his later fascination with the trapeze.

Once upon a time there was a wide-eyed boy named Henri. He lived in Holland during a great war. His hands were large, his ears were large, he was clumsy and awkward, and he felt like a clown.

And so he went to clown seminary. He devoted himself to learning all the gestures a clown must use, flapping his oversize hands like birds, extending them at arms’ length in welcome, clapping them rapidly together as if offering multiple expressions of gratitude for everything and everyone he encountered.

He stuck his neck out, squinted his eyes as if to see better, turned a big ear to hear clearly, bowed grandly but deferentially, and stood on tippy-toes to accentuate his already great height when making a point. And he had a huge, goofy grin that revealed his absolute delight at encountering you.

Henri found a costume that accentuated his vocation, and learned how to apply garish makeup that sometimes covered his true feelings.

So Henri joined the circus, following the poet e.e. cummings’ famous advice: “damn everything but the circus.” He travelled hither and yon, over hill and over dale, as the circus wagons kept rolling along.

He stumbled and fumbled and tumbled and somersaulted his way into people’s hearts. “He is just like us,” they said, sometimes smiling in recognition, sometimes deeply moved as his familiar foibles and limitations tugged at their heart strings. His disabilities mirrored our disabilities.

But Henri had a secret wish: to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Sometimes his height allowed him to catch an arm of a windmill, common in Holland’s countryside, and the uplift took his breath away. He could see great distances and imagine himself flung to the heavens before crashing to earth in a pile of hay, cushioning his fall.

And then Henri met Rodney, a trapeze artist. Rodney was strong and graceful, beautiful and amazing. He was everything Henri wished to be, and  HE COULD FLY! Boy, could he fly, doing doubles and triples midair without a care in the world.

“How do you do that?” Henri asked Rodney, appreciatively. “Being absolutely present in the moment,” Rodney explained. “I let go of everything that can hold me down: my cares, my doubts, my fears, even yesterday’s mistakes. And I trust. I trust the Catcher, and I trust the net. Gravity is not my enemy; it is the friend that brings me home. I can go up toward the skies knowing I will come home. I surrender to the moment and soar, knowing gravity will keep me down to earth.”

Then Rodney added, “It’s the same thing you do when you stumble and fumble and tumble and somersault into people’s hearts—except you do it grounded. Your gravity is compassion. Your home is the heart.”

Henri was stunned. He had never thought of his work in this way. Rodney’s words lifted him up, and Henri felt like this man on the flying trapeze.

My book about Henri:

Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Henri, Vincent, and Compassion

Henri giving Chris a cross from El Salvador

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, the last entry of January and every Wednesday of February I’ve provided the most visited post of each year. For 2015, that would be Progressive vs. “Biblical” Christianity.

My friend, Nouwen biographer Michael Ford, invited me to write this piece about Henri Nouwen for a retreat he is leading on the spiritual writer this week.  It so happens that details of my own spiritual formation course on Nouwen September 22-25, 2016 were posted last week. It tends to fill up, so register early!

When Henri Nouwen proposed a course on “The Life and Ministry of Vincent van Gogh” at Yale Divinity School for the spring semester of 1977, his fellow academics were stymied, expressing concern: “But he was an artist.” “Wasn’t he crazy?” “Didn’t he kill himself?”

I took that seminar and it was my last formal course with Henri, though our friendship would continue through the rest of his life. We viewed photos and prints of van Gogh’s paintings, read his voluminous Letters to Theo (his patron brother), and biographical materials. A limit of a dozen or so students allowed an intimate, conversational format.

Many parallels drew Henri to Vincent. They preferred using only their first names. They were from Holland. Both were prolific. They shared compassion for the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, and the underprivileged. They each exercised unconventional ministries. Both were problematic as well as prophetic for the church. Either could be intense. And both were extremely lonely.

I did not know that Vincent had begun as a conventional Calvinist minister to the coal miners of the Borinage, and that his ministry scandalized the church because he did not keep a “professional” distance—descending into the mines with them, chatting with them at their kitchen tables, giving them his possessions, including his own bed to a sick woman.

This led to his dismissal from his pulpit by the church hierarchy and a long idle period trying to discern, “What next?” He decided to take up painting, hoping that his work would offer the same consolation that the Christian faith once did, even as Henri’s books about our very human challenges consoled his readers.

Unlike Vincent, who only sold two paintings in his lifetime, Henri’s books soon touched millions, either directly or indirectly through their influence on Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant pastors and lay leaders throughout the world.

Henri’s classes helped countless students discern their true vocations, not just in ministry, but determining what kind of minister they were called to be. As the final paper for that course I wrote a fictional story about a woman in transition, ministered by two versions of van Gogh’s Madame Roulin and Her Baby, which I spent time contemplating, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City.

Writing that story was the most fulfilling paper I produced in all three years of seminary, because it brought together compassion (my required muse) and creativity, as well as my callings as a writer and minister.

I am grateful to Henri and Vincent for their spiritual guidance. Vincent once wrote that Jesus was an artist whose medium was human flesh. Both Henri and Vincent followed in his footsteps as soul artists.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“Woman, Behold Your Son. Son, Behold Your Mother.”

Click on their names to find other posts that refer to Vincent van Gogh or Henri Nouwen.

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Donations of $100 or more either at once or over 2016 will receive a signed gift copy of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Interrupted Lives

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

My friend, fellow writer, AIDS volunteer and chaplain Pat Hoffman gave me a copy of Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life during the early years of the AIDS crisis in southern California. She thought Etty’s diaries witnessing the Nazi takeover of her native Holland and the deportation of Jews to German death camps might speak to the experience of the prematurely interrupted lives we were beholding.

As I read, Etty also spoke to my sexuality, my writing, and my progressive faith. Unbound by religious trappings, subsequently claimed by both Jews and Christians, this young Jewish woman wrote, “When I pray, I hold a silly, naïve or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience sake I call God.”

As the editor of her letters, G. K. Garlaandt explains in the introduction, “Her mysticism led her not into solitary contemplation but squarely back into the world of action. Her vision had nothing to do with escape or self-deception, and everything to do with a hard-won, steady and whole perception of reality.”

Etty claimed a sense of equilibrium in the face of virulent madness as she wrote, “I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life. For belief in God and for a miserable end.”

And, as she anticipated being transported to Germany and its concentration camps, she boldly prayed:

Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that you cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

Speaking about Etty Hillesum this past Sunday as an example of “Our Lives as Sacred Texts,” I was reminded that today, November 30, is the anniversary of her death at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 29. And this is the eve of World AIDS Day, December 1.

Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen advised against comparing the intensity of one’s suffering with that of others, explaining, “Your suffering is your own.” Yet Etty’s interrupted life shares a continuum with other interrupted lives, just as her words speak to my own vocation of writing:

Such longing to jot down a few words! Such a strong sense of: here on these pages I am spinning my thread. And a thread does run through my life, through my reality, like a continuous line. … It’s not so much the imperfect words on these faint blue lines, as the feeling, time and again, of returning to a place from which one can continue to spin one and the same thread, where one can gradually create a continuum, a continuum which is really one’s life.